


Birds of a Feather

by Kirstein_and_Arlert



Series: Birds of a Feather [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Origin Story, Super Soldier Serum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-12
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2018-02-04 08:13:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1771996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kirstein_and_Arlert/pseuds/Kirstein_and_Arlert
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For six months, Clint's been stuck guarding a group of scientists. It's the least interesting and least dangerous job that SHIELD could have given him. Until one day it isn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Birds of a Feather

**Author's Note:**

> This is my answer to where Clint was during Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Or at least where he started.
> 
> For the prompt 'birds of a feather flock together' on m fc_smorgasbord table.

Clint rubs his eyes, squinting in the bright light. He has no idea how the scientists can work in this lab, which he calls a fluorescent hellhole whenever he talks to Natasha about it. The long hours of guarding the scientists make his eyes hurt. He doesn’t even know how the rats can live like this, although he assumed that they get to sleep in the dark when no one’s working, not the strange, barely lit quarters Clint’s been staying in for the last six months.

Since he was removed from the field indefinitely. Now he’s stuck guarding a group of scientists, who are doing who knows what to rats.

“You can take a break, you know,” one of the scientists says. Morse, he thinks her name is. The only woman on the entire team, and the one Fury told him to stick close to. She’s standing beside one of the tanks of rats, writing in the battered notebook she never lets out of her sight. He’d asked what was in it the first week he’d been assigned to the project, and she’d laughed and told him that it contained secrets that could start an inter-agency war. “You look like hell.”

“Thanks,” Clint says sarcastically. “That’s just what I wanted to hear.”

 _From another person_. Natasha’s said it at least three times in the last month, and he’s only seen her four times.

“I’m just saying, you might want to take a break and get some sleep before you fall asleep and break something. That test tube rack by your elbow contains blood samples from five people who have spliced their DNA with animal DNA. You don’t want that getting into your blood.” Morse leans forward conspiratorially, close enough that none of the other scientists will be able to hear them. “It doesn’t end well. Lizard people. Lion people. Lots of teeth.”

She leans back, smiling, and Clint nods, not entirely sure what to think. She’s a bit weird, nothing like he’d expected Doctor Barbara Morse to be like when he’d heard her name and work. He’d expected someone serious, in their fifties at the youngest, but Morse can’t be any older than her mid-thirties, and has a sense of humour that doesn’t fit with the other scientists.

Morse talks about monsters like she’d love to see them up close, take the samples from them in a fight. It’s enough to make Clint ache for the field, to think about tempting her to get a bit too close to anything strange that comes their way.

She’d love it, he thinks, remembering the way her face had lit up when one of the rats had mutated and ended up a snarling, poisonous thing that was four times the size it was supposed to be.

Okay, maybe it’s not _just_ the field that he’s, well, longing for right now. But he’s been stuck in this fluorescent hellhole for six months, and before that, he’d been staying with Natasha.

Clint’s slept _with_ Natasha plenty of times, but he’d drawn the line at having sex with someone on the other side of a wall, in her apartment.

His eyes begin to close again, and Clint fights it, reminding himself what happened the last time he let his guard down on the job. A demi-god or alien, or whatever Loki is, came through and – he pushes those thoughts away. He tries not to think about what came after.

“Go on, go,” Morse says, waving the hand that isn’t holding her top secret notebook. “I can take care of myself for a few hours. All I have to do is administer some serums to the latest batch of test subjects. I promise I won’t die in a mysterious lab accident while you’re sleeping.”

Clint rubs his eyes again, opens his mouth to say no, and changes his mind. “Sure. But I’m going to hold you to that promise. And call me in two hours.”

 

 

Something’s wrong. That’s the first thing Clint realises when he wakes up. The clock says that it’s been six hours since he got back to his room, but that’s not what woke him.

 _She was supposed to call me_ , he thinks, rubbing his eyes.

The low light has changed to red and is flashing. There’s a siren blaring above him. Someone’s breaking in. He grabs his bow, quiver, and two guns. The lab.

“Morse,” he murmurs, unlocking the door and starting down the hallway. Morse didn’t call him, which means that something’s happened. Fury had said that she was top priority. He never should have left the damn lab, he should have stayed there, maybe taken a nap in the store room that has a camp bed in it, but he definitely shouldn’t have left.

Clint turns the corner and starts down the stairs, taking them two at a time, and occasionally glancing up through the gap between the flights of stairs. It’s far too quiet for a high level alert. His foot slips on something wet, something that looks dark in the red lights, and Clint doesn’t stop to think about what it is.

 _Morse. Get to the lab. Get to Morse._ Morse with her serums, and top secret notebook that could start a war. The last time, he was supposed to guard Selvig and make sure that nothing bad happened. _Don’t think about Loki, don’t think about the last disaster, just keep going._

Clint jumps the last four steps and runs down the corridor that leads to the lab. There’s blood on the floor, spent cartridges scattered everywhere.

He slows down as he reaches the lab, listening for voices. The sirens are quieter down here, and he can make out voices in the lab.

“You weren’t supposed to kill her. We were supposed to take her alive because she’s useful.”

“I didn’t know it was her! I didn’t think some scientist bitch would be that good with a gun!”

“What are we going to do with her?”

“Nothing. We just hope that no one asks any questions when we say that she killed herself when she realised we wanted her alive.”

Something hits the back of Clint’s head hard enough to make the world flash bright white before the red begins to seep back through as he staggers into the lab. Another hit and he goes down hard, between two of the tables.

The first thing Clint sees is the gun lying nearby, one that Clint recognises as the one with the specialised bullets that Morse was developing a serum for. They’re supposed to make sure that your target doesn’t bleed out before you want them to. Good for scaring people, Morse had said.

Then—

Morse. She’s only a few feet away from him. Her lab coat is soaked with blood and there’s a growing pool of it under her. She’s staring at him with wide, terrified eyes, one hand pressed to her stomach like she thinks it will help. Through and through gunshot wound to the abdomen.

 _A slow bleeder, thanks to the bullets_ , Clint thinks bitterly as the room swims around him. She’s bleeding to death so slowly that she’ll probably stay alive for the next twelve hours. Unconscious for most of it, unless there’s someone to force consciousness, but alive. There’s something beside her, something that he thinks is a bo staff.

 _You fought back. Good for you,_ The room is getting fuzzier, spinning faster. He’s going to be sick, he’s going to be sick and die, if he doesn’t die first. _Make them think twice about going after scientists. Make them think twice about…_

 

 

“Should we kill him?” one of the men asks, and Bobbi tries to focus on his face as he leans over Barton. Barton’s unconscious, not dead. She can see him breathing, slowly, but it’s breathing, and that’s more than enough.

_Remember his face. Remember every detail and make sure that you never forget._

“Forget it. Neither one of them will be alive for much longer and there weren’t that many agents around. Everyone else is dead and there won’t even be any sign of them after the building’s blown. In less than… twelve hours, they’ll be nothing but .”

She can taste blood. Barton’s breathing, but Bobbi doesn’t think she will for much longer. It’s been… an hour, maybe, since they shot her.

Well, it’s nice to know that the blood loss reduction bullets are a success. Maybe she can write a report in her own blood, get it to Fury, as well as a great big _FUCK YOU_ for resurrecting this stupid project. For telling her that she’d be a good agent. For every single time that she’s spoken to him in the past seven years. For every single thing that led to this moment, to Bobbi dying on the floor of some underground that halfway around the world.

Her mom and brother won’t even grieve for her, because they think she’s been dead for almost six years. Bobbi had given that part of her life up, she’d given up everything from publishing papers to her family, and for what?

All those stupid serums won’t help her now. They’re on the other side of the room, and she thinks that the bullet hit her spine, because she can’t move her legs. She’s dying. She’s dying, and there isn’t even anyone she can talk to, someone she can tell that she’s terrified, that she doesn’t want to die like this.

Barton stirs weakly as the HYDRA agents leave the lab, kicking aside the body of one of the guards on their way. Agent Hendricks, who has a photograph of his wife and daughters in his wallet.

 _Everyone else is dead. They killed them all. And over fucking super soldier serum, of all things_. Tears prick her eyes and she blinks them away.

Bobbi gasps. When they’d come in, she was about to inject a rat. She’d grabbed her battle staves from one of the shelves under the table, and the rat had ran away. One of them had panicked and shot it. The syringe…

The hypodermic syringe. Where is it? Bobbi twists, crying out as more pain tears across her stomach.

 _Come on, come on, where are you, you son of a bitch?_ She’s not going to die, not without one hell of a fight. She’d fought them when she’d first broken into the lab. She’s not just going to lie down and die, not while there’s a chance.

The syringe is right beside her bo staff. Bobbi bites back the laughter that swells in her chest. Fitting. Her two favourite weapons. Science and the battle staves. The way she tried to save herself, and the way she’s about to try.

“This is stupid, this is so stupid,” Bobbi mutters as she fumbles with the hypodermic, trying to get the vein in her left arm. _Fucking spaghetti veins_. No human experimentation is one of her own personal rules, the one she’d demanded be followed by the others right from the start. They’d rolled their eyes, but had happily followed her when they’d discovered that she was on the first Project: Gladiator. _Got it_.

She can feel everything around her fading. The fingers of her left hand are beginning to go numb, and everything’s getting darker. It’s getting harder to hold the hypodermic.

It’s breaking the rules. All of them. Every single one, from human experimentation, to progressing to human trials without adequately testing the serum on non-humans.

 _But, hey_ , Bobbi thinks as she depresses the plunger, watches the serum level drop as the world begins to fade into darkness. _I’ve never been great at following my own plans. Why should my rules be any different?_

 

 

The only lights are the dull greenish ones. There’s no red flashing lights, no sirens, no signs of human life.

And Clint’s got one hell of a headache.

 _Someone would have come by now. There’s no one coming._ Everyone else was dead. That was what they’d said. Everyone else…

He doesn’t even bother getting to his feet, just pulls himself to his knees as slowly as he can. It feels like his head is going to split right open if he moves too quickly.

“Morse?” he asks, wincing at the sound of his voice, how loud it seems in the darkness. She’s still just a few feet away, her eyes closed, her face spattered with her own blood. Her blood all over the floor, bloody handprints smeared around her hands and on the legs of the table. When Clint touches her hand, it’s still warm. “No…”

She’s not been dead for long.

 _I could have saved her. If I’d woken up earlier, if I’d not been hit from behind, if I’d stopped to think instead of just running in_. Now everyone else is dead, and he’s the only one still alive.

Just like the last time. So many dead agents, and he gets out with a headache and some bruises. Clint doesn’t even try to stop the tears. Morse is dead. They’re all dead.

“Those tears for me, sport?”

Clint opens his eyes. Morse is staring up at him, smiling at him. It makes the dried blood around her mouth crack and flake away. He stares at the blood as she eases herself up into an awkward kneeling position – he notices through her ripped shirt that there’s no wound – and doesn’t stop staring until she does an awkward shuffle-lunge and throws her arms around him.

“Morse.” It’s barely a whisper. He’s not sure if she’s clutching him as tightly as he’s clinging to her, but he doesn’t care. Someone’s alive. He’s not the only one this time. There are no superheroes to save the day, and someone else is alive.

“Bobbi,” she says, choking her sobs against his shoulder, and it takes Clint’s frazzled mind a second to realise that she’s telling him her name. “Barton?”

“Clint.”

Morse -- _Bobbi_ repeats his name half a dozen times, laughing nervously, babbling something about super soldier serum and how this is all so stupid, before dissolving into hysterical laughter.

“You’re alive,” he says, not caring that her lab coat is a bloody mess. He can feel her clutching at his shirt, pulling it away from where the blood has stuck it to his back. “You’re alive,” he repeats, not quite believing it.

“We’re alive,” Bobbi corrects him, squeezing him tighter. “ _We’re_ alive.”

 _Yeah_ , Clint thinks, hugging her tighter until she laughs and says she gives up. _We are_.

They stay there, kneeling on the floor, clinging to each other like this is all going to turn out to be some horrible dying dream, for a long time.


End file.
